you can’t help but have fun with this; it’s been years since I laughed this much on a Monday morning. All of it puerile/juvenile. Wonderful knockabout stuff.
As pointed out above, Parliament is in recess because of the party conference season. Lib Dems this week.
I don’t believe they have an official policy on the matter. However, enough of their contributors will have signed up on the Corbyn bandwagon to make my suggestion of hypocrisy relevant. An even larger percentage of readers of both papers, and twitterati contributors, will also have backed the campaign for a new type of politics. You don’t post 10 stories online unless you believe these same readers and social media community will be clicking on your stories with a great amount of zeal. In fact one of them has said as much in this thread. Sure, Up the Junction looks at this story as small fry(it really is difficult to write about this story without a hint of a double entendre somewhere) but the attempt to smear and ridicule political opponents is being attempted by the media and political activists today in spades.
Im not entirely against smearing opponents. I think a great deal of good is done by ridiculing and undermining politicians. However, I simply think it ought to be pointed out when one side claim it an unfair practice yet are quite happy to indulge in it when it suits them.
Oh, I think there’s no small number of people gleefully retweeting this story who were calling “smear” last week over the latest OTT anti-Corbyn story. But I don’t think you can really say that covering what is, let’s face it, the only news story anyone’s going to remember today is evidence of hypocrisy on behalf of the papers. It’s a story about the PM fucking a pig - of course people are going to click on it. The Sun has three separate stories from the biography on its homepage - are they indulging in leftist smearing or are they just reporting a major story.
“Enough of their contributors will have signed on” is pretty weak, especially as contributors won’t be setting editorial policy. How many contributors have explicitly endorsed Corbyn’s specific approach to politics and media?
Above all, the new style of politics comes from Corbyn down - I’d wait till he puts the boot in on this before claiming it’s dead.
Just so we are accurate here, no real pig fucking(or almost anyones definition of pig fucking) was involved. What was allegedly involved was exactly what I would expect at a secret society of rich privilleged libertarians named after a rich, privilleged libertarian homosexual. David Cameron getting his rocks off at sexing up a pig this was not. This was good old fashioned frat stuff as hopefully Boris Johnson, George Osbourne and Darius Guppy cheered him on.
I agree, it was a bit weak from me. I still believe a number of contributors to The Guardian will have signed up to the “new era of politics” line. I really can’t be arsed going through either papers editorial line. However, im as certain as the day is long that both papers will rightly condemn “playing the man” form of politics when it suits them, especially when that man is politically in line with their own views.
I disagree that this new politics comes from Corbyn down. We cant expect Corbyn’s opponents to hold fire whilst various allies(and his footsoldiers on social media) of his do all the dirty work.
So even though it was right-wing newspapers that broke this story, and even though the papers you mention are really not pro-Corbyn, and even though Corbyn dislikes the mainstream press and didn’t even give any of them an interview after he was selected, this story is somehow the fault of Corbyn’s team? Huh?